Rove spoke to Time reporter about CIA agent, lawyer saysBut Plame wasn't identified by name in the discussion, the Bush aide's attorney says

JOSH WHITE, Washington Post |
July 11, 2005

WASHINGTON - White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove spoke with at least one reporter about Valerie Plame's role at the CIA before she was identified as a covert agent in a newspaper column two years ago, but Rove's lawyer said Sunday that his client did not identify her by name.

Rove spoke with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper on July 11, 2003, three days before Robert Novak publicly exposed Plame in a column about her husband, Joseph Wilson IV. Wilson had come under attack from the White House for his claims that he found no evidence Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger and that he reported those findings to top administration officials. Wilson publicly accused the administration of leaking his wife's identity as a means of retaliation.

The leak of Plame's name to the press spawned a federal grand jury investigation that has been seeking the origin of the disclosure. Cooper avoided jail time last week by agreeing to testify before the grand jury about conversations with his sources, while New York Times reporter Judith Miller was jailed for refusing to discuss her sources.

To be considered a violation of the law, a disclosure by a government official must have been deliberate, and the person doing it must have known that the CIA officer was a covert agent and that the government was concealing the covert agent's identity.

Cooper, according to an internal Time e-mail obtained by Newsweek magazine, spoke with Rove before Novak's column was published. Rove gave Cooper a "big warning" that Wilson's claims might not be entirely accurate and that it wasn't the director of the CIA or the vice president who sent Wilson on his trip. Rove told Cooper that it was "Wilson's wife, who apparently works at the agency on wmd (weapons of mass destruction) issues who authorized the trip," according to Newsweek's July 18 issue.

Rove's conversation with Cooper could be significant because it indicates a White House official was discussing Plame before she was exposed and because it could lead to evidence of how Novak learned her name.